Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold

Tony Liang

University of British Columbia

October 3, 2024

What is protein?

  • Building blocks of life.
  • Involved in every important activity that happens inside every living thing
  • Protein folding matters but hard to solve
  • We knew 3D structures for only about 17% of roughly 20000 proteins in the human body

What’s special of protein structure?

  • Protein function is closely related to its structure.

  • So, knowing structure helps scientists design new medicines and understand diseases.

However . . .

  • Figuring out a protein’s structure is extremely hard.

  • It’s like solving 3D puzzle with thousands of pieces, yet without knowing what the final picture looks like.

  • Usually done by long time and expensive experiments.

Caption 1

Thanks to magical AI

Alphafold

  • Fun story: Rise from a competition “Olympics for protein folding”
    • Given one dimensional amino acid sequence, can you predict the protein structure?
  • Artificial Intelligence tool that predicts protein structure from sequence.
  • Very well prediction to be within width about one atom
  • We know have ….

Future with Alphafold

  • I dont know